So I think the problem is not the taste, it's simply that people who eat healthy or vegan don't go to burger king in the first place.
If you compare it to garbage fast food, then of course the impossible burger will be better.
There's a massive difference between a McDonald's burger and the kind of burger you'd make fresh (or order at a non-fast-food restaurant). It's not a subtle issue of taste. They're just completely different dishes.
Whoa there. "Enjoy" might be a bit generous. I might suggest endure. A lot of people eating fast food burgers are not doing it because they enjoy it, but at their cheap prices it is just something they can afford. Yes, there is a large portion of people that "like" fast food burgers, and that might be a number that reaches "plenty". But I would imagine that enjoyment is similar to when I was a broke ass college age person that could only afford ramen and enjoyed it as being better than nothing.
And I love well prepared burgers. I love steak. And I love goldfish. I disagree strongly with your comment.
One is an ethical position, and the other is self care, which aren't particularly correlated, except that both require self-control.
The vegetarian equivalent isn't anything you can buy (in a supermarket anyway), they're all crap, it's making your own with good (non-meat) ingredients.
100x better than fast food "burgers"
I guess the pre-made plant burgers will be close to pre-made meat burgers.
I wonder if you can make your own burger out of soy granules, which I found to be the closest to ground beef when properly spiced during rehydration. I should try that some time.
Tanget: Americans in Germany often say our McD tastes better. I find that fascinating, as McD here tastes absolutely horrible to me.
You could thaw it out, break it down, season it and re-form it. But who does that?
There's a whole lot of seasoning going on with well cooked ground beef. When you go to a restaurant and the burgers pop -- this is why.
The most basic seasoning is salt. Unseasoned beef doesn't taste great and when it's cooked less than ideally often excess condiments are used to make up for the lack of seasoning.
When I cook burgers at home I often mix in diced garlic, a tiny bit of soy sauce, cayenne, msg, and rosemary.
One of my kids went through a phase of eating burgers with no toppings at all. Another, noodles with no sauce. It's a preference, but - if the topic is quality of cuisine it shouldn't be surprising that people have higher expectations.
The salt mixed into many pre-made patties makes them increasingly rubbery the longer they sit in the supermarket. The seasonings are usually a crapshoot.
Toppings are a separate matter. Go to town.
Years later I tried an impossible whopper, and unlike the veggie burger it was actually vile. The taste and texture were bizarre, not like meat but neither like vegetable. It tasted like something that came out of a chemistry lab, not a kitchen.
Elsewhere in this thread I see people suggesting that real meat be taxed, or subsidies removed, or some other form of government action to twist people's arms into eating a meat substitute. My advise to those commenters is this: Do it with traditional veggie patties and the general public might forgive you. Do it with these new wave of psuedo-meats and it will make people hate vegans with 10x more passion than they already do.
I agree, I’d just like a good veggie burger sometime. Doesn’t need ultra processing.
I switched from sirloin burgers (~$1.30/patty) to beyond burgers (~$2/patty). I found the taste and texture of Beyond Burgers to be better than Impossible burgers, but neither is as good as the sirloin burgers. Cooking them on a smoker narrows the flavor gap. Beyond burgers are lower fat and 100 calories less per patty, the primary reason I made the substitution and one of reasons I haven't switched back.
General comment about salt: packaged foods in the US are overloaded with salt and your doctor will be happier if you never add salt to what's on your plate.
I’ll admit tho if we compare fast food then I don’t really mind impossible meat. Fast food burgers are very soso.
At some point people are just going to have to admit either they're selfish and want to keep eating meat, or they really do want to stop eating meat and just do it. It's just a human thing to try and find excuses.. I do it with going to the gym and going swimming more.
Also, as a side note. If you don't buy meat OR fake meat, it's cheaper. There are hundreds of cuisines around the world that don't depend on meat.
Sorry but it does wind me up the mental gymnastics people do to justify continuing doing something they know it bad.
Same goes for tofu. The Asian cuisines have created dozens of great recipes over decades if not centuries that involve tofu, but here people completely ignore all that and try to make tofu look, feel and taste like sausages, schnitzel, and mostly fail at it.
When you analyze something you first do the components that you have an analysis of (fuels, …) and then for what is left over you multiply the dollar cost by a ratio representing the emergy/dollar ratio for the economy.
A consequence of that is that something expensive is probably unecological because money is a license to use resources and trash the environment.
One is that the "transformity" (ratio of emergy to energy) is path dependent. One ear of corn might have been produced with more or less water or fertilizer, both of which contain more emergy than the sunlight that falls on it.
Another is that you can't trace all energy to "the" sun or at least not our sun. The energy of Thorium and Uranium in the Earth's crust probably came from two other stars that became neutron stars and crashed into each other.
Emergy accounting does a good job of accounting for externalities of consumption (e.g. trace back water use in Central Valley agriculture to Shasta Lake) but doesn't do a good job of accounting for the production of noxious influences.
The latter may be intractable, may really be the death of environmental accounting, because instead of producing one number for a product you produce numerous numbers. How can you compare 1 g of tetraethyl lead in the air to 1 ton of CO2? A megacurie of Krypton 85 to a kilogram of PFAS?
There is a field of "multiobjective optimization" that considers these problems but leaves as many questions as answers in that different people are going to see the trade-offs differently.
(It reminds me of the doomed project where I was working with some people to create an "NQ" score for the nutritional value of food and we couldn't get consensus on how to combine factors. For instance it is good to eat riboflavin but you can't give nutritional yeast, which colors your urine bright yellow with riboflavin, a score proportional to how much riboflavin it has. It wasn't clear to us if it really made sense to evaluate individual foods... You really need to eat protein/Vitamin C/Zinc if you haven't had any today, you don't need to if you have. We weren't even sure you could assign it to foods w/o reference to portion size... One scoop of ice cream is not so bad but the whole box is something different.)
I had high hopes because I had watched these TV segments where they were eating them and saying how it tastes like a burger. But not for me.
Edit: Either it's juicy and the texture isn't right, or the texture is right but it isn't juicy, or the flavour isn't there. It just doesn't taste real enough, in some ways its SO close... /end edit.
Wife and I tried some of the beyond meat from the super market and that was once... never again, it was not good, any of it. Its sometimes /very/ salty, even if I don't add salt...
(as a side note I donno if it's changed but it's more expensive to buy beyond meat than it is to buy real meat)